Dinosaurs are big. Really big. So it’s news when they find the biggest dinosaur footprint ever, together with a diverse population of other footprints.
“The tracks provide a snapshot, a census if you will, of an extremely diverse dinosaur fauna,” Steve Salisbury, the study’s lead author, told Gizmodo. “Twenty-one different types of dinosaurs all living together at the same time in the same area. We have never seen this level of diversity before, anywhere in the world. It’s the Cretaceous equivalent of the Serengeti! And it’s written in stone.”
It was found in Australia, so pardon the cheap Crocodile Dundee joke in the title.
On a completely different note…do not read the youtube comments. I was surprised. This is a simple science report, and the comments are a horrible worthless cesspool of idiots ranting about “fake news” and, for some reason, bringing up Trump. Really, Google, get it together. The quality of youtube commentary has almost hit bottom (and I only say “almost” because I know they can get worse.)
This should be SOP for *all* YouTube videos. It’s far rarer and more surprising to find a comments section there that *isn’t* horrible than one that *is*.
AND LOOK!!!! There’s the body of some guy that the Dino stepped on!!!
Checkmate eviloootionistas!!!!!
:gently puts jaw back in place:
Wow. That really aids in putting it all in perspective, doesn’t it? I’m 66 inches tall, and that footprint is longer than me, so I had quite the image pop into my head. That’s amazing, and wonderful. It also makes it all the more boggling that some people can still insist that humans and dinosaurs existed at the same time and interacted.
Hit bottom? Oh please Professor, they haven’t even gotten out their picks and shovels yet!
Agreed, and yet…
Complaining about YouTube comments is like complaining that used toilet paper stinks. Yes, you are 100% correct. But why on earth did you ever suspect otherwise long enough to put your nose to it? I’d wish they’d turn off commenting altogether, but it’s a public service of a sort; they take all of that vileness and squirrel it away somewhere where at least no one has to look at it but it’s own perpetrators…
Al Jazeera English comments are far worse than YouTube comments, so there’s that much…
I know youtube comments are an easy target, but I was shocked that a simple science story had gotten flooded with so much bullshit. It didn’t even mention feminism or social justice!
“Dinosaurs are big. Really big”
Well, aren’t most of them actually pretty small? I understand that today’s birds are genetically dinosaurs, and while a few of them are pretty big, most of them are not.
YouTube commenters really are terrible, for the most part. I am kind of shocked these days when I come across a comment thread that is mostly civil. Typically it just takes one person injecting something irrelevant into the comment thread (typically about politics or religion) and the shit storm begins. Surprised that people have time to engage in such low stakes blather.
“[P]ardon the cheap Crocodile Dundee joke in the title.”
Never!
Crikey!!
In fact, you won’t believe how….
Great, now I have to re-read HHGTTG for the gagillianth time.
“This is a simple science report, and the comments are a horrible worthless cesspool of idiots ranting about “fake news” and, for some reason, bringing up Trump.”
That is because CNN (among other news sources) has been covering Trumpelstiltskins repeal ACA failure and the Russian ties to so many (including The Donald himself) of his appointees. Hence CNN and other news sources have instantly become “fake news” among these Trump goons and potential Russian shills, even in mundane science reporting. They have no facts supporting Trump so anything that does not fit into their preconceived idiotic views must “logically” be fake news to them. Creationists and other obscurantists routinely project their own shortcomings onto their critics. You will note that such obscurantist projection activities actually helped Trump get into the White House so they are not about to abandon that winning (for them) methodology.
I was reading the other day that major advertisers are dropping YouTube because of the terrible comments, and Google’s lack of action about it. Loss of revenue may make them pay attention. We’ll just have to wait and see.
Yeah, so I looked at the comments. If Google ever figures out a way to turn hateful ignorance into electricity, then global warming will be solved.
@gijoel #15 –
Are you kidding?! If the harnessed that and turned it into electricity, it could probably boil the Pacific; not a good global warming scenario…
Wow! that was close. It almost stepped on that guy.
I’ve actually been following the story connected with this one (it fits in nicely with my “what went right” blog post series, so it’s been showing up in there regularly). Essentially, there’s a fairly lengthy stretch of coast up north of Broome here in Western Australia which holds all these dinosaur footprints. It’s traditional territory and sacred land for the local Aboriginal tribes. Which of course means there’s plans to develop it and put a marina on some of the more accessible bits (because why woudn’t there be?). There’s also been attempts to sell some of the footprints on the black market (one guy attempted to cut one out with an angle grinder, and flog it off – fortunately it was retrieved and returned). But there’s actually a lot of rather complicated things happening up there, because there’s people who want to see development; there’s people who want to see tourism happening there; there’s the local Indigenous folk, whose tribal lands these are, and who are concerned about how (and indeed whether) they’re going to be able to keep sacred places treated in a sacred way; there’s the palaeontologists from Queensland; there’s local politics; state politics; and of course national politics getting involved in the whole business. So beside the 1.7m footprints, and all the little ones as well, there’s a lot of other stuff going on.
@Meg Thornton:
I followed the link to the actual paper (freely downloadable, but ~230MB(!) in size), and noticed that the paper has a long section in the beginning called “Indigenous Knowledge of Dinosaurian Tracks in the Broome Sandstone”. Given what you write, I kinda guess that the palaeontologists put that in to emphasize the Aboriginal claims to the trackways, because they are siding with them on keeping the trackways protected and undeveloped on.